Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (PPRM) is a wealthy, multi-state Planned Parenthood affiliate that does over 10,000 abortions per year. PPRM has a contract to supply aborted fetal tissue to Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

In the video, actors posing as representatives from a human biologics company meet with Ginde at the abortion-clinic headquarters of PPRM in Denver to discuss a potential partnership to harvest fetal organs. When the actors request intact fetal specimens, Ginde reveals that in PPRM’s abortion practice, “Sometimes, if we get, if someone delivers before we get to see them for a procedure, then we are intact.”

Since PPRM does not use digoxin or other feticide in its 2nd trimester procedures, any intact deliveries before an abortion are potentially born-alive infants under federal law (1 USC 8).

“We’d have to do a little bit of training with the providers or something to make sure that they don’t crush” fetal organs during 2nd trimester abortions, says Ginde, brainstorming ways to ensure the abortion doctors at PPRM provide usable fetal organs.

When the buyers ask Ginde if “compensation could be specific to the specimen?” Ginde agrees, “Okay.” Later on in the abortion clinic’s pathological laboratory, standing over an aborted fetus, Ginde responds to the buyer’s suggestion of paying per body part harvested, rather than a standard flat fee for the entire case: “I think a per-item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it.”

The sale or purchase of human fetal tissue is a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison or a fine of up to $500,000 (42 U.S.C. 289g-2). Federal law also requires that no alteration in the timing or method of abortion be done for the purposes of fetal tissue collection (42 U.S.C. 289g-1).

Ginde also suggests ways for Planned Parenthood to cover-up its criminal and public relations liability for the sale of aborted body parts. “Putting it under ‘research’ gives us a little bit of an overhang over the whole thing,” Ginde remarks. “If you have someone in a really anti state who’s going to be doing this for you, they’re probably going to get caught.”

Ginde implies that PPRM’s lawyer, Kevin Paul, is helping the affiliate skirt the fetal tissue law: “He’s got it figured out that he knows that even if, because we talked to him in the beginning, you know, we were like, ‘We don’t want to get called on,’ you know, ‘selling fetal parts across states.’” The buyers ask, “And you feel confident that they’re building those layers?” to which Ginde replies, “I’m confident that our Legal will make sure we’re not put in that situation.”

As the buyers and Planned Parenthood workers identify body parts from last fetus in the path lab, a Planned Parenthood medical assistant announces: “Another boy!”

The video is the latest by The Center for Medical Progress documenting Planned Parenthood’s sale of aborted fetal parts. Project Lead David Daleiden notes: “Elected officials need to listen to the public outcry for an immediate moratorium on Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding while the 10 state investigations and 3 Congressional committees determine the full extent of Planned Parenthood’s sale of baby parts.” Daleiden continues, “Planned Parenthood’s recent call for the NIH to convene an expert panel to ‘study’ fetal experimentation is absurd after suggestions from Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Ginde that ‘research’ can be used as a catch-all to cover-up baby parts sales. The biggest problem is bad actors like Planned Parenthood who hold themselves above the law in order to harvest and make money off of aborted fetal brains, hearts, and livers.”

In response to a question by a parliamentarian on how long this battle will continue, Khamenei said,“Battle and jihad are endless because evil and its front continue to exist. … This battle will only end when the society can get rid of the oppressors’ front with America at the head of it, which has expanded its claws on human mind, body and thought. … This requires a difficult and lengthy struggle and need for great strides.”

Nasser Hadian got his doctorate at the University of Tennessee and taught at Columbia. He is now a Tehran University political scientist and influential voice in policy circles. His daughter is in graduate school at Tulane. “Saying ‘Death to America’ is meaningless,” he told me. “It’s actually not acceptable in our culture, because they’re saying death to a whole people. It’s said by only twenty per cent of the population. And only a teeny per cent of that twenty per cent believes in it. They think America crystallizes and stands for all bad things in the world—the same way some Americans think about Iran. America has killed more Iranians than Iranians have killed Americans. The U.S. supported Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran, when hundreds of thousands died.”

He went on, “For others, it’s part of a religious ritual. But the élite who use it exploit the term for political reasons. Poll after poll shows that Iranians are greater supporters of America than any other Muslim country in the region.

“So whom does America want to rely on to judge public opinion?” Hadian asked. “The twenty per cent who do shout ‘Death to America!’ or the eighty per cent who don’t?”

They found around a fifth of the comments about the research ‘can be considered conspiracist’.

It builds on a previous survey that the researchers conducted, which found up to 40 per cent of those who are skeptical about global warming use imagery that invoked conspiracy theories.

This includes the use of words like ’scam’ and repeated references to faked data and collusion between scientists and governments to deliberately conceal evidence.

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, an experimental psychologist at the University of Bristol who led the work, said: ‘These results add to a growing body of research on the nature of internet discourse and the role of the blogosphere in climate denial.

‘It also confirms that conspiratorial elements are readily identifiable in blogosphere discourse’

- Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have demonstrated what many of us have long suspected: that the ‘debate’ over the climate crisis–and many other environmental issues–was manufactured by the same people who brought you ’safe’ cigarettes. Anyone concerned about the state of democracy in America should read this book. (Former Vice President Al Gore, author of An Inconvenient Truth)

- The real shocker of this book is that it takes us, in just 274 brisk pages, through seven scientific issues that called for decisive government regulation and didn’t get it, sometimes for decades, because a few scientists sprinkled doubt-dust in the offices of regulators, politicians and journalists … Oreskes and Conway do a great public service. (Huffington Post)

- Merchants of Doubt, by the science historian Naomi Oreskes and the writer Erik Conway, investigates a sort of reverse conspiracy theory: ecoterrorists and socialists are not the ones foisting dubious science upon us; rather it is deniers who are running their own well-funded and organized long-term hoax. Several previous works have ably illuminated similar themes, but this one hits bone…[Merchants of Doubt] provide[s] both the historical perspective and the current political insights needed to get a grip on what is happening now. (OnEarth)

- Merchants of Doubt might be one of the most important books of the year. Exhaustively researched and documented, it explains how over the past several decades mercenary scientists have partnered with tobacco companies and chemical corporations to help them convince the public that their products are safe - even when solid science proves otherwise…Merchants of Doubt is a hefty read, well-researched and comprehensive…I hope it sells, because what it has to say needs to be heard. (Christian Science Monitor)

- Ever wonder how the terms liberty and freedom got all tangled up in fake science, how industry friendly think-tanks got their start, or what motivates scientists to sell out beyond the obvious? (Austin Science Policy Examiner)

As the old saying goes, “news is something that someone somewhere doesn’t want you to know” - and here was information about a significant player in climate politics that it certainly didn’t want you to have.

For advocates of climate action, the Heartland documents offered a rare glimpse into the world of the conservative power players who work to cast doubt on climate science and delay action on global warming — the same people authors Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway called the “Merchants of Doubt” in their 2010 book by the same name.

You can see where I’m headed. Gleick’s intentions matter when we try to work out whether he was wrong to lie. It’s worth noticing that he wasn’t lying for personal gain. What resonates for me, though, are the consequences of his action. If Gleick frustrates the efforts of Heartland, isn’t his lie justified by the good that it does?

From 1910 to 2010, the number of Christians in the Middle East — in countries like Egypt, Israel, Palestine and Jordan — continued to decline; once 14 percent of the population, Christians now make up roughly 4 percent. (In Iran and Turkey, they’re all but gone.) In Lebanon, the only country in the region where Christians hold significant political power, their numbers have shrunk over the past century, to 34 percent from 78 percent of the population. Low birthrates have contributed to this decline, as well as hostile political environments and economic crisis. Fear is also a driver. The rise of extremist groups, as well as the perception that their communities are vanishing, causes people to leave.

Sister Diana, an influential Iraqi Christian leader, who was scheduled to visit the U.S. to advocate for persecuted Christians in the Mideast, was denied a visa by the U.S. State Department even though she had visited the U.S. before, most recently in 2012.

She was to be one of a delegation of religious leaders from Iraq — including Sunni, Shia and Yazidi, among others — to visit Washington, D.C., to describe the situation of their people. Every religious leader from this delegation to Washington D.C. was granted a visa — except for the only Christian representative, Sister Diana.

After this refusal became public, many Americans protested, some writing to their congressmen. Discussing the nun’s visa denial, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said:

This is an administration which never seems to find a good enough excuse to help Christians, but always finds an excuse to apologize for terrorists … I hope that as it gets attention that Secretary Kerry will reverse it. If he doesn’t, Congress has to investigate, and the person who made this decision ought to be fired.

The State Department eventually granted Sister Diana a visa.

This is not the first time the U.S. State Department has not granted a visa to a Christian leader coming from a Muslim region. Last year, after the United States Institute for Peace brought together the governors of Nigeria’s mostly Muslim northern states for a conference in the U.S., the State Department blocked the visa of the region’s only Christian governor, Jonah David Jang.

It has been nearly impossible for two U.S. presidents — Bush, a conservative evangelical; and Obama, a progressive liberal — to address the plight of Christians explicitly for fear of appearing to play into the crusader and ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ narratives the West is accused of embracing. In 2007, when Al Qaeda was kidnapping and killing priests in Mosul, Nina Shea, who was then a U.S. commissioner for religious freedom, says she approached the secretary of state at the time, Condoleezza Rice, who told her the United States didn’t intervene in ‘‘sectarian’’ issues. Rice now says that protecting religious freedom in Iraq was a priority both for her and for the Bush administration. But the targeted violence and mass Christian exodus remained unaddressed. ‘‘One of the blind spots of the Bush administration was the inability to grapple with this as a direct byproduct of the invasion,’’ says Timothy Shah, the associate director of Georgetown University’s Religious Freedom Project.

More recently, the White House has been criticized for eschewing the term ‘‘Christian’’ altogether. The issue of Christian persecution is politically charged; the Christian right has long used the idea that Christianity is imperiled to rally its base. When ISIS massacred Egyptian Copts in Libya this winter, the State Department came under fire for referring to the victims merely as ‘‘Egyptian citizens.’’ Daniel Philpott, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, says, ‘‘When ISIS is no longer said to have religious motivations nor the minorities it attacks to have religious identities, the Obama administration’s caution about religion becomes excessive.’’

For more than a decade, extremists have targeted Christians and other minorities, who often serve as stand-ins for the West. This was especially true in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, which caused hundreds of thousands to flee. ‘‘Since 2003, we’ve lost priests, bishops and more than 60 churches were bombed,’’ Bashar Warda, the Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Erbil, said. With the fall of Saddam Hussein, Christians began to leave Iraq in large numbers, and the population shrank to less than 500,000 today from as many as 1.5 million in 2003.

The Arab Spring only made things worse. As dictators like Mubarak in Egypt and Qaddafi in Libya were toppled, their longstanding protection of minorities also ended. Now, ISIS is looking to eradicate Christians and other minorities altogether. The group twists the early history of Christians in the region — their subjugation by the sword — to legitimize its millenarian enterprise. Recently, ISIS posted videos delineating the second-class status of Christians in the caliphate. Those unwilling to pay the jizya tax or to convert would be destroyed, the narrator warned, as the videos culminated in the now-­infamous scenes of Egyptian and Ethiopian Christians in Libya being marched onto the beach and beheaded, their blood running into the surf.

The future of Christianity in the region of its birth is now uncertain. ‘‘How much longer can we flee before we and other minorities become a story in a history book?’’ says Nuri Kino, a journalist and founder of the advocacy group Demand for Action. According to a Pew study, more Christians are now faced with religious persecution than at any time since their early history.

When the first Islamic armies arrived from the Arabian Peninsula during the seventh century, the Assyrian Church of the East was sending missionaries to China, India and Mongolia. The shift from Christianity to Islam happened gradually. Much as the worship of Eastern cults largely gave way to Christianity, Christianity gave way to Islam. Under Islamic rule, Eastern Christians lived as protected people, dhimmi: They were subservient and had to pay the jizya, but were often allowed to observe practices forbidden by Islam, including eating pork and drinking alcohol. Muslim rulers tended to be more tolerant of minorities than their Christian counterparts, and for 1,500 years, different religions thrived side by side.

One hundred years ago, the fall of the Ottoman Empire and World War I ushered in the greatest period of violence against Christians in the region. The genocide waged by the Young Turks in the name of nationalism, not religion, left at least two million Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks dead. Nearly all were Christian. Among those who survived, many of the better educated left for the West. Others settled in Iraq and Syria, where they were protected by the military dictators who courted these often economically powerful minorities.

As Diyaa and Rana hid in their basement, ISIS broke into stores and looted them. Over the next two weeks, militants rooted out most of the residents cowering in their homes, searching house to house. The armed men roamed Qaraqosh on foot and in pickups. They marked the walls of farms and businesses ‘‘Property of the Islamic State.’’ ISIS now held not just Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, but also Ramadi and Fallujah. (During the Iraq War, the fighting in these three places accounted for 30 percent of U.S. casualties.) In Qaraqosh, as in Mosul, ISIS offered residents a choice: They could either convert or pay the jizya, the head tax levied against all ‘‘People of the Book’’: Christians, Zoroastrians and Jews. If they refused, they would be killed, raped or enslaved, their wealth taken as spoils of war.

By 9 a.m., ISIS had separated men from women. Seated in the crowd, the local ISIS emir, Saeed Abbas, surveyed the female prisoners. His eyes lit on Aida Hana Noah, 43, who was holding her 3-year-old daughter, Christina. Noah said she felt his gaze and gripped Christina closer. For two weeks, she’d been at home with her daughter and her husband, Khadr Azzou Abada, 65. He was blind, and Aida decided that the journey north would be too hard for him. So she sent her 25-year-old son with her three other children, who ranged in age from 10 to 13, to safety. She thought Christina too young to be without her mother.

ISIS scanned the separate groups of men and women. ‘‘You’’ and ‘‘you,’’ they pointed. Some of the captives realized what ISIS was doing, survivors told me later, dividing the young and healthy from the older and weak. One, Talal Abdul Ghani, placed a final call to his family before the fighters confiscated his phone. He had been publicly whipped for refusing to convert to Islam, as his sisters, who fled from other towns, later recounted. ‘‘Let me talk to everybody,’’ he wept. ‘‘I don’t think they’re letting me go.’’ It was the last time they heard from him.

No one was sure where either bus was going. As the jihadists directed the weaker and older to the first of two buses, one 49-year-old woman, Sahar, protested that she’d been separated from her husband, Adel. Although he was 61, he was healthy and strong and had been held back. One fighter reassured her, saying, ‘‘These others will follow.’’ Sahar, Aida and her blind husband, Khadr, boarded the first bus. The driver, a man they didn’t know, walked down the aisle. Without a word, he took Christina from her mother’s arms. ‘‘Please, in the name of God, give her back,’’ Aida pleaded. The driver carried Christina into the medical center. Then he returned without the child. As the people in the bus prayed to leave town, Aida kept begging for Christina. Finally, the driver went inside again. He came back empty-handed.

(…)

As the bus rumbled north out of town, Aida sat crumpled in a seat next to her husband. Many of the 40-odd people on it began to weep. ‘‘We cried for Christina and ourselves,’’ Sahar said. The bus took a sharp right toward the Khazir River that marked an edge of the land ISIS had seized. Several minutes later, the driver stopped and ordered everyone off.

Led by a shepherd who had traveled this path with his flock, the sick and elderly descended and began to walk to the Khazir River. The journey took 12 hours.

The second bus — the one filled with the young and healthy — headed north, too. But instead of turning east, it turned west, toward Mosul. Among its captives was Diyaa. Rana wasn’t with him. She had been bundled into a third vehicle, a new four-wheel drive, along with an 18-year-old girl named Rita, who’d come to Qaraqosh to help her elderly father flee.

The women were driven to Mosul, where, the next day, Rana’s captor called her brothers. ‘‘If you come near her, I’ll blow the house up. I’m wearing a suicide vest,’’ he said. Then he passed the phone to Rana, who whispered, in Syriac, the story of what happened to her. Her brothers were afraid to ask any questions lest her answers make trouble for her. She said, ‘‘I’m taking care of a 3-year-old named Christina.’’

For a brief morbid summary, in the past two weeks the Center for Medical Progress has released findings from their 3-year investigation into Planned Parenthood. Their first undercover video contained footage of a doctor describing the potential of selling aborted babies’ body parts for profit, all while enjoying her lunch. The second video featured an abortionist discussing prices for the organ harvesting, while callously joking she ‘wants a Lamborghini.’

Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards tried (unsuccessfully) to defend her organization on ABC’s “This Week.” Now, however, she will be forced to do damage control once again.

In its third released video, the CMP interviews an ex-procurement technician from the company StemExpress. Holly O’Donnell describes how she thought she was just tasked with drawing blood when she applied for the company, yet soon realized, to her horror, they wanted her to procure tissue from aborted fetuses. Then the harvesting began:

One of the hackers, identified only as E, told Daily Dot the attack was motivated by Planned Parenthood’s politics.

“Trying to mold an atrocious monstrosity into socially acceptable behaviors is repulsive,” E said. “Obviously what [Planned Parenthood] does is a very ominous practice. It’ll be interesting to see what surfaces when [Planned Parenthood] is stripped naked and exposed to the public.”

The hacking group allegedly plans to release internal emails to the public.

The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.

Woman and the New Race, ch. 6: “The Wickedness of Creating Large Families.” Here, Sanger argues that, because the conditions of large families tend to involve poverty and illness, it is better for everyone involved if a child’s life is snuffed out before he or she has a chance to pose difficulties to its family.

[We should] apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.

Article 1. The purpose of the American Baby Code shall be to provide for a better distribution of babies… and to protect society against the propagation and increase of the unfit.
Article 4. No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child, and no man shall have the right to become a father, without a permit…
Article 6. No permit for parenthood shall be valid for more than one birth.

We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

[The most penetrating thinkers] are coming to see that a qualitative factor as opposed to a quantitative one is of primary importance in dealing with the great masses of humanity.

Pivot of Civilization, 1922. Here, Margaret Sanger speaks on her eugenic philosophy – that only the types of “quality” people she and her peers viewed as worthy of life should be allowed to live.

Such parents swell the pathetic ranks of the unemployed. Feeble-mindedness perpetuates itself from the ranks of those who are blandly indifferent to their racial responsibilities. And it is largely this type of humanity we are now drawing upon to populate our world for the generations to come. In this orgy of multiplying and replenishing the earth, this type is pari passu multiplying and perpetuating those direst evils in which we must, if civilization is to survive, extirpate by the very roots.

Women of the working class, especially wage workers, should not have more than two children at most. The average working man can support no more and and the average working woman can take care of no more in decent fashion.

“The war on terror, that campaign without end launched 14 years ago by George Bush, is tying itself up in ever more grotesque contortions.” skriver Seumas Milne for Guardian og konkluderer at stormagterne ikke kan nedkæmpe “Isis and its monstrosities” fordi det er “the same powers that brought it to Iraq and Syria in the first place, or whose open and covert war-making has fostered it in the years since”. Og han leverer et glimrende eksempel på de vestlige lederes fortvivlede ragen rundt i det muslimske ælte

On Monday the trial in London of a Swedish man, Bherlin Gildo, accused of terrorism in Syria, collapsed after it became clear British intelligence had been arming the same rebel groups the defendant was charged with supporting The prosecution abandoned the case, apparently to avoid embarrassing the intelligence services. The defence argued that going ahead withthe trial would have been an “affront to justice” when there was plenty of evidence the British state was itself providing “extensive support” to the armed Syrian opposition. That didn’t only include the “non-lethal assistance” boasted of by the government (including body armour and military vehicles), but training, logistical support and the secret supply of “arms on a massive scale”. Reports were cited that MI6 had cooperated with the CIA on a “rat line” of arms transfers from Libyan stockpiles to the Syrian rebels in 2012 after the fall of the Gaddafi regime. Clearly, the absurdity of sending someone to prison for doing what ministers and their security officials were up to themselves became too much.

A revealing light on how we got here has now been shone by a recently declassified secret US intelligence report, written in August 2012, which uncannily predicts – and effectively welcomes – the prospect of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria and an al-Qaida-controlled Islamic state in Syria and Iraq. In stark contrast to western claims at the time, the Defense Intelligence Agency document identifies al-Qaida in Iraq (which became Isis) and fellow Salafists as the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” – and states that “western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey” were supporting the opposition’s efforts to take control of eastern Syria. Raising the “possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality”, the Pentagon report goes on, “this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran)”. Which is pretty well exactly what happened two years later. The report isn’t a policy document. It’s heavily redacted and there are ambiguities in the language. But the implications are clear enough. A year into the Syrian rebellion, the US and its allies weren’t only supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups; they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state” – despite the “grave danger” to Iraq’s unity – as a Sunni buffer to weaken Syria. That doesn’t mean the US created Isis, of course, though some of its Gulf allies certainly played a role in it – as the US vice-president, Joe Biden, acknowledged last year. But there was no al-Qaida in Iraq until the US and Britain invaded. And the US has certainly exploited the existence of Isis against other forces in the region as part of a wider drive to maintain western control.

Turkey is evidently unsettled by the rapprochement the PKK seems to be establishing with the U.S. and Europe. Possibly alarmed by the PKK’s victories against ISIS, as well as its strengthening international standing, Ankara, in addition to targeting ISIS positions in Syria, has been bombing the PKK positions in the Qandil mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, where the PKK headquarters are located. As expected, many Turkish media outlets were more enthusiastic about the Turkish air force’s bombing the Kurdish militia than about bombing ISIS. “The camps of the PKK,” they excitedly reported, “have been covered with fire.” It appears as if Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is using ISIS as a pretext to attack the PKK. Ankara just announced that its air base at Incirlik will soon be open to coalition forces, presumably to fight ISIS, but the moment Turkey started bombing, it targeted Kurdish positions. Those attacks not only open a new era of death and destruction, but also bring an end to all possibilities of resolving Turkey’s Kurdish issue non-violently. (…) Sadly, Turkey has preferred not to form a “Turkish-Kurdish alliance” to destroy ISIS. First, Turkey has opened its borders to ISIS, enabling the growth of the terrorist group. And now, at the first opportunity, it is bombing the Kurds again. According to this strategy, “peace” will be possible only when Kurds submit to Turkish supremacism and abandon their goal of being an equal nation. In the meantime, Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkish minister of foreign affairs, said that the Incirlik air base in Turkey has not yet been opened for use by the U.S. and other coalition forces, but that it will be opened in the upcoming period.

In the video, Nucatola is at a business lunch with actors posing as buyers from a human biologics company. As head of PPFA’s Medical Services department, Nucatola has overseen medical practice at all Planned Parenthood locations since 2009. She also trains new Planned Parenthood abortion doctors and performs abortions herself at Planned Parenthood Los Angeles up to 24 weeks.

The buyers ask Nucatola, “How much of a difference can that actually make, if you know kind of what’s expected, or what we need?”

“It makes a huge difference,” Nucatola replies. “I’d say a lot of people want liver. And for that reason, most providers will do this case under ultrasound guidance, so they’ll know where they’re putting their forceps. The kind of rate-limiting step of the procedure is calvarium. Calvarium—the head—is basically the biggest part.”

Nucatola explains, “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”

“And with the calvarium, in general, some people will actually try to change the presentation so that it’s not vertex,” she continues. “So if you do it starting from the breech presentation, there’s dilation that happens as the case goes on, and often, the last step, you can evacuate an intact calvarium at the end.”

Using ultrasound guidance to manipulate the fetus from vertex to breech orientation before intact extraction is the hallmark of the illegal partial-birth abortion procedure (18 U.S.C. 1531).

Nucatola also reveals that Planned Parenthood’s national office is concerned about their liability for the sale of fetal parts: “At the national office, we have a Litigation and Law Department which just really doesn’t want us to be the middle people for this issue right now,” she says. “But I will tell you that behind closed doors these conversations are happening with the affiliates.”

The sale or purchase of human fetal tissue is a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $500,000 (42 U.S.C. 289g-2).

The video is the first by The Center for Medical Progress in its “Human Capital” series, a nearly 3-year-long investigative journalism study of Planned Parenthood’s illegal trafficking of aborted fetal parts. Project Lead David Daleiden notes: “Planned Parenthood’s criminal conspiracy to make money off of aborted baby parts reaches to the very highest levels of their organization. Elected officials must listen to the public outcry for Planned Parenthood to be held accountable to the law and for our tax dollars to stop underwriting this barbaric abortion business.”

Planned Parenthood thinks CPM has video of at least two of its conferences as well as PP staff dissecting babies for organs, expressing a preference for black babies, sniffing – if not taking – the bait on large kickbacks for baby parts, admitting (which has already happened twice) to illegally manipulating abortions to retrieve intact organs and body parts, and much, much, much more about which it has no idea.

The Social Justice Warriors forgot that most Americans just don’t like mean people. And in one two-week span of American life, millions of SJWs helpfully and unmistakably labeled themselves with their rainbow profile pictures, then proceeded to act like hectoring, condescending, arrogant scolds — loudly and publicly, day after day. They were mean. They mocked Christians, celebrated the plight of a Christian baker’s family as it faced financial ruin for refusing to facilitate a gay wedding, and kept pointing at the Supreme Court and the White House as if they represented some sort of cosmic scoreboard — as if the only response for conservatives was to take their ball, slink away, and go home.

I’m reminded of the way that the first great wave of political correctness was brushed back. A generation ago, colleges were passing speech codes and proudly calling them speech codes. This was the time when the term “politically correct” was considered a compliment — when the hostility to conservative speech was so profound that conservatives were shouted down in class, sometimes even by the professors themselves. For a while, the angry Left was ascendant. Many students believed — at least for a time — that extreme measures were necessary for the sake of the marginalized and historically oppressed. But then, people just kept being mean. Over time, moderates — including more moderate liberals — rejected the extremes, and by the late 1990s colleges became almost unrecognizably civil. Even today, with a new wave of repression surging across campuses, they still haven’t reached the depths of the Bad Old Days.

A generation ago, the social-justice Left tried its best to silence the pro-life movement — to treat the very utterance of pro-life sentiment as an affront against women. They failed, utterly. Pro-life speech is still of course constitutionally protected, and the pro-life movement is arguably stronger than it’s ever been. Indeed, it’s just received an incalculable boost through videos that show Planned Parenthood being Planned Parenthood. Unable to learn, the social-justice Left is going back to the old, failed playbook of the 1990s — trying its best to silence cultural conservatives on marriage – and in so doing they are once again showing their totalitarian colors. Once again, they’re being mean. Americans don’t like mean.

No matter how “ordinary” their sons seemed, how many parties they attended and, how many of their American friends saw nothing wrong with them, they were always ticking time bombs waiting for the right confluence of theology and anger to explode.

The people of Boston and Chattanooga unknowingly lived with these ticking time bombs. Ticking time bombs just like them are all around us; Muslim families with scowling fathers, timid mothers, a history of failed businesses, growing resentment toward the infidel, sons who drift through life despite good schools and numerous opportunities until they find their focus around the black flag of the Jihad.

A young jihadist who once dreamed of becoming Britain’s first Asian Prime Minister before later joining Isil has reportedly been killed in a drone strike.

Reyaad Khan, 21, from Cardiff, was one of the first Britons to appear in an Isil propaganda video last year, alongside two other British fanatics.

Other fighters with the terror group reported on Twitter that he had been killed in a strike in Raqqa, possibly on the tenth anniversary of the 7/7 terror attacks on London.

(…)

The former Catholic school student, who as a teenager said he wanted to become Britain’s first Asian prime minister, featured alongside two other Britons in a recruitment propaganda video for the terror group released in June 2014.

(…)

Khan grew up in a terraced house in the Welsh capital in the same road as Abdul Miah, one of the ringleaders of a foiled plot to unleash a Mumbai-style terror attack on London.

Former schoolmates at Cantonian High School in Cardiff remembered him as a talented scholar who had moderate views and mixed well with people of all backgrounds.

But in 2013 they noticed his interest in religion appeared to intensify and he successfully applied to study at the Madinah University in Saudi Arabia - although he did not take up the position.

Since then Khan used Twitter to post a series of gruesome pictures and sickening boasts, writing in July 2014: “Executed many prisoners yesterday.”

A few days later he tweeted: “Probably saw the longest decapitation ever. And we made sure the knife was sharp.”

Shin Bet considered him its most valuable source within the Hamas leadership: the information Yousef supplied prevented dozens of suicide attacks and assassinations of Israelis, exposed numerous Hamas cells,[1] and assisted Israel in hunting down many militants, including the incarceration of his own father, a Hamas leader SheikhHassan Yousef.[4] In March 2010, he published his autobiography titled Son of Hamas.[5]

In 1999, Yousef converted to Christianity, and in 2007 moved to the United States.[2] His request for political asylum in the United States was granted pending a routine background check on June 30, 2010

“If we blame Hamas, we need also to blame the ideology that inspires them. If we fight Hamas or any radicals or fundamentalist groups, we need to understand that we are fighting their ideology. Islam is their foundation. If we’re not aware of this, we increase the chance that terror will win over peace.

“Islamic ideology is an aggressive and dangerous ideology, inspired by Muhammad, the founder of Islam. It’s very clear from Islamic texts and from the Qur’an that it is a violent ideology. People who say that it is peaceful, they have no clue. It’s a sick religion, born in a sick man’s mind.”

As they confront the rising threat of modern jihadist violence, many of the nations most at risk are retreating behind one of the oldest forms of defense.

Tunisia and Turkey are the latest to invest in border barriers, both announcing the plans in the immediate aftermath of attacks on civilian targets. A fence and watchtowers will guard Tunisia’s border with Libya, where the militants who killed foreign tourists on a Tunisian beach are said to have been trained. Turkey said late Wednesday it will fortify the border with Syria after a suicide bomb in a nearby town.

From Morocco to Saudi Arabia, boundaries are being fortified at a rate not seen since the months following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Though modern barriers may curb trafficking and illicit crossings in the short term, they almost never deliver prolonged security without cross-frontier cooperation.

“Israel’s barriers have worked well for them so far,” said Brent Sterling, author of “Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?” and a professor at Georgetown University. Long-term, though, they remove the incentive to try and reach a permanent accord with the Palestinians, he said.”

Bulgaria has built a 33-km (21-mile), three-meter-high (10-foot) barbed wire fence along its border with its southeastern neighbor Turkey in an effort to limit the influx of migrants from Syria and other parts of the Middle East and North Africa. The Interior Ministry has also deployed more than one thousand police officers to patrol the Turkish border.

Greece has erected a 10.5-km, four-meter-high barbed-wire fence along part of its border with Turkey. The Greek wall is said to be responsible for diverting migration routes toward neighboring Bulgaria and, consequently, for construction of the wall there.

Spain has fortified fences in the North African exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla as record numbers of migrants are jumping over the barriers from neighboring Morocco. Border police registered more than 19,000 attempts to jump the fence at Melilla in 2014, up 350% on 2013, according to the Interior Ministry. Nearly 7,500 migrants successfully entered Ceuta and Melilla in 2014, including 3,305 from Syria.

The UK is setting up more than two miles of nine-foot-high security fencing at the Channel Tunnel port of Calais in northern France, in an attempt to stop thousands of illegal migrants breaking into trucks bound for the UK. Currently, more than 3,000 migrants are camped in and around Calais hoping to make it to Britain. More than 39,000 would-be illegal immigrants were prevented from crossing the Channel in the 12 months prior to April, more than double the previous year.

EU member states are implementing other emergency measures to halt the flow of immigration.

Austria has stopped processing asylum claims as of June 13, in an effort to make the country “less attractive” for migrants relative to other EU countries. According to Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner, Vienna was “stopping the Austrian asylum express,” whereby applications are processed within an average period of four months, faster than in any other EU country. Asylum requests for Austria rose nearly 180% in the first five months of 2015 to 20,620, and were on track to reach 70,000 by the end of the year.

Denmark on July 1 announced that it would slash benefits for asylum seekers to bring down the number of refugees coming to the country. It recently emerged that three out of four refugees who came to Denmark in the early 2000s are jobless ten years later.

France and Italy have sparred over who is responsible for hundreds of African migrants stranded at Ventimiglia on the France-Italy border after French police refused to let them in. France accused Italy of failing to respect the so-called Dublin Regulation, a law that requires people seeking refuge within the EU to do so in the first European country they reach. Italian officials argued that the migrants see Italy as only a transit country.

Hungary on June 23 suspended its adherence to the Dublin Regulation, which requires Hungary to take back refugees who have travelled through the country to reach other EU countries.

Meanwhile, the European Commission, the EU’s powerful bureaucratic arm, on May 27 announced a controversial “relocation plan” that would require EU member states to accept 40,000 Syrian and Eritrean asylum seekers from Italy and Greece over the next two years.

Det lægger håb til at koranen er en valid og fortællingen om Muhammed er ‘ægte’. Men Robert Spencer skriver på Jihad Watch, at “the more one looks at this curious story, the less there is to see”.

The article is riddled with academic and journalistic sloppiness. We’re told that the radiocarbon dating shows, “with a probability of more than 95%, the parchment was from between 568 and 645.” Very well, but does the ink date to that time as well? We are not told. Parchment was often reused in the ancient world, with the earlier text erased and written over, and so if a parchment dates from 645, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the text does.

However, it is impossible to discover any more details from this shoddy BBC presentation. The best photo of this manuscript that the BBC provides shows clear traces of another text underneath the main text. It is not clear from the photo whether that is the text from the other side bleeding through on the photograph, or even if there is any text on the other side; nor does the BBC tell us whether or not the parchment shows signs of having been a palimpsest — that is, a parchment that was used more than once for different texts. There is also some red ink in the top lines of the manuscript in the photo but not in the succeeding lines. Has the red ink faded from the other sections, or is it itself evidence of the ink fading? Or is it a later hand filling in areas that had faded away (and possibly altering the text)? The BBC doesn’t tell us, yet this is an extremely salient point. Another recently discovered and much-touted fragment of the Qur’an, now in Germany and dated from between 649 and 675, shows clear signs of alteration, raising the possibility that the Qur’anic text was altered over time. If this is a possibility also for the University of Birmingham manuscript, the BBC should tell us so. But it doesn’t.

What’s more, if the text along with the parchment really dates from between 568 and 645, it may not be a fragment of the Qur’an at all. The Qur’an, according to Islamic tradition, was compiled in its definitive form in the year 653 by the caliph Uthman, who ordered all variant texts burned and the canonical version distributed to all the provinces within his domains. As I show in my book Did Muhammad Exist?, however, there are numerous reasons to doubt this story. The principal one is that if the entire Islamic world had copies of the Qur’an by the mid 650’s, why is it that not until the latter part of the seventh and early part of the eighth century do mentions of the Qur’an begin to appear? The Dome of the Rock inscriptions date from 691; they are made up of many Qur’an verses, but out of their Qur’anic order and some with notable changes in wording. Who would have dared to change the words of Allah? And the first clear reference to the Qur’an as such occurred around the year 710—eighty years after the book was supposedly completed and sixty years after it was supposedly collected and distributed. During a debate with an Arab noble, a Christian monk of the monastery of Beth Hale (of which there were two, one in northern Iraq and the other in Arabia; it is not known in which one this monk lived) cited the Qur’an by name. The monk wrote, “I think that for you, too, not all your laws and commandments are in the Qur’an which Muhammad taught you; rather there are some which he taught you from the Qur’an, and some are in surat albaqrah and in gygy and in twrh.”

(…)

So if this is a fragment of the Qur’an as it now stands (and what portion of the Qur’an is it, anyway? Neither the BBC nor its quoted academics tell us), and yet it could date from as far back as 568, two years before Muhammad is supposed to have been born, it might not be a fragment of the Qur’an at all. It could instead be a portion of some source that later became part of the Qur’an, as did Surat al-Baqara.

Professor David Thomas, also without telling us what exact portions of the Qur’an this manuscript contains, raises even more questions when he says: “These portions must have been in a form that is very close to the form of the Koran read today, supporting the view that the text has undergone little or no alteration and that it can be dated to a point very close to the time it was believed to be revealed.” This is a very strange statement. The BBC, and apparently the University of Birmingham, are advertising this as an ancient fragment of the Qur’an. Presumably when Thomas says that “these portions must have been in a form that is very close to the form of the Koran read today,” he means that the larger whole of which they once formed a part was “very close” to the Qur’an. But how close is “very close”? Mainstream Muslims maintain that the Qur’anic text has undergone no alteration at all since it was first “revealed.”

There is nothing “modern” or free-market about the EU. It is an old-fashioned cartel whose roots lie in the Confederation of the Rhine and Bonaparte’s Continental System. Like those precedents, it is a political project with dirigiste economic objectives bolted on – most notoriously the unworkable euro currency. It aspired to extinguish national and popular will across Europe and enslave the continent to the delusional aspirations of a selfish and bureaucratic elite. With the complicity of the media, for decades it contrived to brainwash electorates into accepting its mendacious claims. Now, that is all over.

Across Europe, over the past week, there has been a wave of revulsion against the EU, its tyrannical diktats, its contempt for the will of electorates, its economic incompetence and its transparent lies. Suddenly, all the hype, the jargon and the pretence have been stripped away. The evil empire’s lost credibility can never be recovered. We are living in a new climate where any politician who attempts to comply with Brussels will forfeit domestic acceptance. The U-turn by Alexis Tsipras, now attempting to railroad through a democratic parliament a “bailout” package harsher than that rejected by 62 per cent of the Greek electorate just ten days ago has destroyed the last vestige of credibility of the political class.

When even “revolutionary” politicians with a massive mandate to resist Brussels roll over before the EU juggernaut – now more accurately to be described as a rickety Heath Robinson contraption – the days of the political class, as currently constituted, are numbered. And it is in this crisis situation for the discredited EU and its Toytown currency that a referendum on continuing British membership is impending.

Now is the time for Eurosceptics to press home their advantage.

(…)

The EU is 64 years old and it is showing its age. It was the product of panicky post-War reaction to a recent frightening experience, when the German guns menaced England from Calais. What menaces us from Calais today is a more successful invasion by feral aliens sponsored by the EU. We must get out and that view is rapidly becoming a majority rather than a minority opinion.

DUBAI (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said a speech by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on Saturday vowing to defy American policies in the region despite a deal with world powers over Tehran’s nuclear program was “very disturbing”.

“I don’t know how to interpret it at this point in time, except to take it at face value, that that’s his policy,” he said in the interview with Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television, parts of which the network quoted on Tuesday.

“But I do know that often comments are made publicly and things can evolve that are different. If it is the policy, it’s very disturbing, it’s very troubling,” he added.

Ayatollah Khamenei told supporters on Saturday that U.S. policies in the region were “180 degrees” opposed to Iran’s, at a speech in a Tehran mosque punctuated by chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”.

“Even after this deal our policy toward the arrogant U.S. will not change,” Khamenei said….

We also know who bears the responsibility for this fiasco––Barack Obama. Historically ignorant and terminally narcissistic, Obama has all the superstitions and delusions of the progressive elite. And one of the most persistent and hoary of those beliefs is the fetish of diplomacy as a means to resolve disputes without force.

We must remember that Obama pointedly ran on the promise to “reinvigorate” American diplomacy. This trope was in fact a way to run against George Bush, whom the Dems and the media had caricatured as a “cowboy” with an itchy trigger finger, a gunslinger scornful of diplomacy and multilateralism. That charge was a lie––Bush wasted several months on diplomacy in an unsuccessful attempt to get the U.N.’s sanction for the war, even though the U.S. Congress had approved it, Hussein was in gross violation of the first Gulf War cease-fire agreement, and the U.N. already has passed 17 Security Council resolutions, all of which Hussein had violated.

Yet the narrative that Bush had “failed so miserably at diplomacy that we are now forced to war,” as then Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle put it, lived on. For the progressives committed to crypto-pacifism and to the belief that America is a guilty aggressor, the story was too politically useful. Obama, one of the most programmatic progressives in the Senate, embodied all those superstitions. As senator he continually criticized the war in Iraq, scorned the ultimately successful “surge” of troops in 2007 as a “reckless escalation” and a “mistake,” and introduced legislation to remove all troops from Iraq by March 2008.

As a presidential candidate, his whole foreign policy was predicated on his being the “anti-Bush” who would “reinvigorate diplomacy” and initiate “engagement” with all our enemies in order to defuse conflict and create peace. As president, Obama has been true to his word. He has apologized, groveled, bowed to potentates, “reset” relations with our rivals, shaken hands with thugs, and now talked Iran into being a nuclear power. As for “peace,” it is nowhere to be found as violence and atrocities multiply from Ukraine to Yemen, Tunisia to Afghanistan.

(…)

The belief that words alone can transcend this eternal truth of human nature––a belief deeply engrained in the mentality of our leaders and foreign policy establishment–– led to the disaster of World War II, and will despite this lesson of history lead to a lesser, but still dangerous, disaster.

But there is yet another factor in this debacle that must be acknowledged: the tendency of democracies to privilege short-term comfort over long-term threats. In democracies the use of force must have the assent of the voters, who in the U.S. every 2 years hold leaders accountable at the ballot box. Setbacks, mistakes, atrocities, casualties, and all the other unfortunately eternal contingencies of mass violence try the patience of voters, and citizen control of the military gives them a means of expressing their impatience or anger. As de Tocqueville recognized more than 150 years ago, “The people are more apt to feel than to reason; and if their present sufferings are great, it is to be feared that the still greater sufferings attendant upon defeat will be forgotten.” That pretty much sums up America’s response so far to Obama’s agreement.

Who would have imagined we would be giving up the conventional arms and ballistic missile embargoes on Iran? In nuclear negotiations?

When asked at his Wednesday news conference why there is nothing in the deal about the four American hostages being held by Iran, President Obama explained that this is a separate issue, not part of nuclear talks.

Are conventional weapons not a separate issue? After all, conventional, by definition, means non-nuclear. Why are we giving up the embargoes?

(…)

The net effect of this capitulation will be not only to endanger our Middle East allies now under threat from Iran and its proxies, but to endanger our own naval forces in the Persian Gulf. Imagine how Iran’s acquisition of the most advanced anti-ship missiles would threaten our control over the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, waterways we have kept open for international commerce for a half-century.

The other major shock in the final deal is what happened to our insistence on “anytime, anywhere” inspections. Under the final agreement, Iran has the right to deny international inspectors access to any undeclared nuclear site. The denial is then adjudicated by a committee — on which Iran sits. It then goes through several other bodies, on all of which Iran sits. Even if the inspectors’ request prevails, the approval process can take 24 days.

And what do you think will be left to be found, left unscrubbed, after 24 days? The whole process is farcical.

Congress won’t get to vote on the deal until September. But Obama is taking the agreement to the U.N. Security Council for approval within days. Approval there will cancel all previous U.N. resolutions outlawing and sanctioning Iran’s nuclear activities.

Meaning: Whatever Congress ultimately does, it won’t matter because the legal underpinning for the entire international sanctions regime against Iran will have been dismantled at the Security Council. Ten years of painstakingly constructed international sanctions will vanish overnight, irretrievably.

Even if Congress rejects the agreement, do you think the Europeans, the Chinese or the Russians will reinstate sanctions? The result: The United States is left isolated while the rest of the world does thriving business with Iran.

“The astonishing thing, which no one has pointed out”, skriver den ægyptiske Imad Al-Din Adib, der sammenligner Iran-aftalen med Chamberlains München-aftale “is that even if Iran complies to the letter with the 85 sections of the agreement, the agreement itself, once its 10-year duration is up, allows [Iran] to produce a nuclear bomb in the 11th year.”

In London, we have had Israeli orchestras, theatre companies and even string quartets howled down by mobs during performances, and Israeli-performed shows cancelled because the venues hosting them just do not want the bother. Last year, the Tricycle Theatre in London refused to proceed with a festival of “Jewish” culture because a tiny proportion of the festival’s funding was coming from the Israeli embassy in London.

The campaign is obviously organized. The same names crop up again and again. Little, if any, rigour is paid to whether the signatories of such letters even do what they say do, or have opinions worthy of any note. Beneath the barely-built veneer of “professionals objecting to something in their own profession,” is just the same tiny number of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish obsessives. A sprinkling of “as a Jew” Jews, like Margolyes, help, of course. But the aim is clear. These people, step by step, want to make every expression of Israeli and Jewish cultural life subject to their idea of how a nation under constant threat of terrorist bombardment should behave. They denounce Israel as a militaristic society and then attempt to outlaw every non-militaristic cultural and artistic expression from that society.

It is the bigotry of our time. And if unchecked, it will lead in the same direction as it historically has done.

In his tour d’horizon of the Palestinian territories, Tenenbom uncovers the fact that there are almost 300 pro-Palestinian foreign NGOs working (that is, agitating) in the West Bank and another hundred in Gaza, most financed by German taxpayers. Moreover, aid to the Palestinians by the European Union and the United Nations is the highest, per capita, in the world. Which might explain why, as Tenenbom keeps noticing all over the West Bank, so many Palestinian officials and activists are driving Mercedes.

(…)

Relying on his unconventional journalistic techniques, Tenenbom elicits a string of unguarded comments from the activists who work so diligently to keep the narrative of Palestinian suffering in the news. He opens a unique window allowing us to see how the victims’ game works in Palestine. For example, the popular Palestinian leader Jibril Rajoub—with the help of willing European collaborators—succeeds in staging a series of morality plays that perpetuate the big lie about his people’s historical innocence and unique suffering. Rajoub lets Tobi the German in on one such full-scale operatic production in the West Bank village of Bi’lin. With compliant Western reporters told where and when to gather, Palestinian youths comes on stage and, on cue, begin stoning Israeli soldiers. The soldiers ignore the “youths,” but the stones get larger and they eventually respond. The self-righteous Western reporters now have their “story” of Israeli violence for the day. Moreover, the event is filmed for a documentary by an Israeli leftist financed by (what else?) a German NGO. Tenenbom knows something about theater, and his satirical account of this staged episode is as priceless as it is depressing.

Tenenbom’s method produces pure satiric gold, as when the wife of an American rabbi who heads a one-man organization called “Rabbis for Human Rights” (financed by a European NGO) can’t contain herself and admits to Tenenbom: “You can’t change him. Being a human rights activist in our time is to be a persona, not a philosophy; it’s a fad, it’s a fashion. A human rights activist does not look for facts or logic; it’s about a certain dress code, ‘cool’ clothing, about language, diction, expressions and certain manners. No facts will persuade him.”

Another highlight of the book is Tenenbom’s visit—arranged by a European NGO—to an inverted Potemkin village of Bedouin encampments in the Negev. In the original historical version of the Potemkin tall tale, the Russian Czar created a few model villages with false facades to convince Western visitors that all was well within the empire. In the twenty-first century version of the tale perfected by anti-Israel NGOs, the technique is to make Palestinian and Bedouin villages look as awful as possible on the outside even when they are relatively well off on the inside. After all, it can never be admitted that the Palestinian people, despite their suffering at the hands of the Jews, constitute the most prosperous Arab community (with the exception of the oil-rich Gulf monarchies) in the Middle East.

An international coalition of over 30 countries and at least a dozen more rebel and terror factions have been unable to prevent the rapid growth of ISIS.

The terror group has expanded its territory, recruited ‘thousands’ of new foreign fighters and brought new jihadi organisations under its wing since an international ‘task force’ to ‘eliminate’ ISIS in October 2014.

At least 42 nations have either carried out airstrikes on ISIS, trained troops and Middle-Eastern tribesman to do battle against it or given weapons to those who are.

Meanwhile, at least a dozen rival Islamist groups are waging bloody war with ISIS on the ground - and for the hearts and minds of Muslims online.

Despite their collective hatred for the Islamic State, these disparate groups have failed to combat and destroy ISIS because their agendas conflict and they are not attacking the heart of the so-called caliphate, a counter-terrorism expert has told MailOnline.

ISIS commands 31,000 loyal fighters according to the United States - up from 16,000 last Autumn - while Kurdish forces put that number at closer to 200,000. And around eight million are thought to live under its barbaric rule.

This inspired more than 60 nations to commit to the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS which was formed to ‘eliminate’ ISIS, even though some of these - including Austria, Sweden and Ireland - are simply providing humanitarian support to the millions made homeless by the insurgents.

As part of Operation Inherent Resolve, the US-led coalition whose purpose is to eliminate ISIS, 13 different countries have executed airstrikes on Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.

The United States and five of its Arab allies - Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates - launched the intense campaign of airstrikes and cruise-missile attacks against ISIS in September 2014.

Since then, America has been responsible for around 60 per cent of the 16,000 bombings on Iraq and Syria carried out since.

While the Nazis tried to hide their worst crimes from the world, the followers of ISIS repeatedly record and distribute video footage of theirs. Between free and open democratic societies, and a society which beheads women for witchcraft, throws suspected gays off buildings, beheads other Muslims and Christians, burns people alive, and does us the favour of video-recording these atrocities and sending them round the globe for us, you would have thought that there would be no moral competition. But there is. And that is not because ISIS has “better ideas, a more attractive and more compelling vision,” but because its appeal comes from a specific ideological-religious worldview that we cannot hope to defeat if we refuse to understand it.

That is why David Cameron’s interjection was so important. The strategy Barack Obama and he seem to be hoping will work in persuading the general public that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam is the same tactic they are adopting in the hope of persuading young Muslims not to join ISIS. Their tactic is to try to deny something that Muslims and non-Muslims can easily see and find out for themselves: that ISIS has a lot to do with Islam — the worst possible version, obviously, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, but a version of Islam nevertheless.

ISIS can destroy its own credibility among advocates of human rights and liberal democracy. The question is how you destroy its credibility among people who want to be very Islamic, and think ISIS is their way of being so. Understand their claims and their appeal, and work out a way to undermine those, and ISIS will prove defeatable not only on the battlefield but in the field of ideas as well. But refuse to acknowledge what drives them, or from where they claim to get their legitimacy, and the problem will only have just started.

The so-called Islamic State movement has very publicly murdered western journalists and aid workers who entered its territory. As a result, IS-held areas of Syria and Iraq have been off-limits to western reporters for the past year. Except for the guest today.

Last December Jürgen Todenhöfer spent ten days inside the self-styled IS caliphate. He emerged unscathed with a remarkable story - what more can he tell us about the jihadists and what can we conclude about his own motivations?

This follows a long-established pattern: once the momentum of a relentlessly expansionary empire such as Brussels is halted, it does not remain stationary – it goes into reverse. When Greece departs from the euro currency, what will happen? Will some other basket-case state be shoe-horned in to replace it? Hardly – not because the madmen in Brussels are not demented enough to try it, but because the German electorate would not stand for it.

So, the Greeks’ referendum decision (kudos, once again, to the highly professional opinion pollsters who were only 22 per cent out in their forecasts this time) means that the contraction of the EU has begun. That is its real, historic significance. That is why screams of anguish are being emitted by the fanatical expansionists in Brussels who, without a twinge of remorse, provoked a bloody war in the Ukraine, in a cack-handed attempt to increase the number of their vassal states.

(…)

That is an attitude increasingly engulfing European youth and it will eventually affect British youngsters too. The best way forward for Eurosceptics is to strain every nerve to convert younger voters to this view before polling day in the referendum. Remember the old canard that all UKIP supporters were elderly men in blazers? Apparently last May there were almost four million of them.

In mainland Europe the Eurosceptic profile is increasingly youthful. By itself, the cult of “yoof” is inane, but harnessing youthful idealism and enthusiasm to the cause of recovering our national sovereignty makes solid sense. Farage is right, too, to espouse a positive Eurosceptic agenda: let’s free ourselves to trade with the rest of the world, let’s escape from a cage controlled by elderly men in grey suits, let’s unshackle our economy from the self-interested red tape of Brussels regulation.

Of course, the Eurosceptic youth vote in countries such as Greece and Spain is unfortunately attached to looney-left parties such as Syriza and Podemos, but that is no reason for supposing it cannot mature with the voters themselves, who may be persuaded to ditch Marxist along with Europhile delusions and finally embrace a sensible course.

Youth is by instinct anti-authoritarian and authoritarianism does not come more repellent than the Brussels bureaucracy. Young people see, behind the photocalls, the large cars, the saluting sentries, the pompous jargon and the solemn press conferences, the underlying reality: this is a bunch of buffoons who have created an unworkable project that is collapsing around them and they haven’t a clue what to do. They tried to suppress economic reality by ideological imperative and now the house of cards is crashing down.

Merkel, the overrated hausfrau, Hollande, the socialist spendthrift, self-pitying Juncker, loud-mouth Schulz and all the other clowns are the incompetents who have broken Europe, while flooding it with countless millions of hostile aliens destroying its culture. It is time for Britain to get out from under this doomed structure before we are crushed by the wreckage.

I have had my doubts about this for years. The EU system is so fundamentally flawed and corrupt that it is doubtful whether it can be reformed in any meaningful way. Corruption and a chronic lack of accountability are not flaws in the system; they are there by design. The EU oligarchs have proven themselves very adept at exploiting crises to further more federal integration. This even goes for problems they have themselves created.

The entire EU system since the days of Jean Monnet has been built on creating a European superstate through deceiving the European public by presenting it as merely an elaborate free trade zone. Lies and deceit have become part of the structural DNA of the European Union.

The EU has essentially bribed the political class throughout much of the European continent, and bought their personal loyalty and support. If they become a part of the EU system, they receive well paid jobs. Moreover, they don’t have to answer to the average citizen for what they do, or how they use or abuse their power. It is easy to see why some people find this combination alluring.

The EU elites have a strong vested interest in keeping up a system that provides them with money, power and prestige. For this reason, any attempts at “reform” are likely to be purely cosmetic and designed to appease the masses. The EU has become a bureaucratic colossus. Just like all bureaucratic systems, it has a natural tendency to try to expand its reach.

I don’t see any solution to this other than to formally and publicly abolish all of the institutions of the European Union. For something like this to happen, the EU would have to face massive and sustained popular pressure throughout the continent. This is unlikely to happen without a major and prolonged economic crisis that destroys the credibility and legitimacy of the EU in the eyes of the general public. We may be heading for just such an event in the years to come.

It is not fair to blame the EU for all of Europe’s ills. For instance, low birth rates are currently found throughout the continent, also in European nations that are not members of the EU. However, the EU makes some existing problems even worse. It also adds new ones of its own making.

If we look at the big picture and the geopolitical situation, Europe as a whole faces major challenges in the coming decades. Two of the biggest ones are the escalating Jihad of radical Islam, and large-scale illegal immigration due to the population explosion in parts of the global South. The EU does not adequately address any of these threats. On the contrary, it makes them worse. The EU continues promoting Muslim mass immigration to Europe. The organization also seeks to force all of its member states to accept illegal immigrants from Africa and the Islamic world. By embracing Islamization and the gradual displacement of native Europeans, the EU has arguably become the anti-European Union.

Future historians will debate whether the EU was a good idea gone bad, or whether it was a bad idea from the very beginning. However, in my opinion, there can be no doubt that the EU as it exists today is a failure. The organization does not solve Europe’s most important challenges, and it adds new problems of its own making.

I cannot predict exactly how or when the EU will finally fall apart, but I strongly suspect that a major economic meltdown will play a major part in its collapse.